


let me sleep (i am tired of my grief)

by astxrwar



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, F/M, Hypothermia, Near Death Experiences, Oral Sex, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Smut, Vaginal Sex, it's like... medicine tho., so many feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:14:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23351515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astxrwar/pseuds/astxrwar
Summary: "Bucky thinks there are some decisions that even people like him can’t come back from, and he thinks that she’s probably one of them. She is sweet and bright-eyed and reckless and beautiful and makes him feel more alive than he has in the past century and she is so entirely too—Too young, he thinks, too innocent, too stubbornly,ridiculouslygood."
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 22
Kudos: 272





	let me sleep (i am tired of my grief)

**Author's Note:**

> Betcha thought I was done  
> (I'm not)  
> (find me on my Tumblr astxrwar)  
> TW for potential dubcon (it's not but Bucky has issues(tm)), near death experiences, minor drug mention.  
> Rated NC-17. 12k. Most of it is the porn bit. Enjoy.

Bucky Barnes figures that as far as morality goes, he— well, he actually isn’t doing that great.

He isn’t  _ good _ . He knows that, and he doesn’t even bother toying with the idea of a redemption arc at this point-- because he has lied too much and cheated too much and  _ killed  _ too much, drowned any and all of his remaining good qualities in dubiously acquired liquor and a string of bad decisions he’d been making long after he’d ran out of viable excuses.

So—

Yeah. He’s killed people. Lots of people. So many that if he were to try to keep track he’s not quite sure his memory would go back that far, men of ages and races and creeds so varied he can’t name them all, even if he can still remember their faces. Some of them were bad men, he knows, just as he knows that some of them  _ weren’t,  _ just as he knows that he is still a murderer, regardless, and that it doesn’t really matter either way. Doesn’t matter if he meant to, or if he wanted to, or if he didn’t— doesn’t matter if he had any choice in it at all. At the end of the day, it’s still his finger pulling the trigger. Still the sound of the shot ringing in his head.

And it’s fine.  _ Really.  _ Bucky had made amends with all of that.

Bucky had expected to die a long time ago— staring down the barrel of Stark’s gun in the middle of fuckall  _ Siberia  _ with Steve at his back and his blood spilling out across the cold concrete, a painfully vibrant reminder of all of the wrong choices he’d made for the right reasons, or maybe before that, on the train, in the valley, sad and still against the snow. 

He’d resigned himself to it.

Accepted it. 

_ Wanted  _ it, maybe, wanted to avoid facing the truth of what he’d done and who he’d become, would much rather have the poetry of this ending instead; one one last sacrifice to atone for his sins.

He’d been prepared to die, is what he’s saying. He’d  _ deserved  _ it.

He didn’t, though. 

Somehow, impossibly, he  _ lived. _

And Bucky likes to think it’s because he’s not evil. It’s because he’s  _ better  _ than that. It’s because he isn’t a slave to senseless violence anymore, despite his upbringing and despite the hell he’s been through. He fought hard to get whatever was left of his moral compass back after the last fucking fifty years, and so he still knows right from wrong— even if the line is most times impossibly blurry. He knows there are things he shouldn’t do. He knows there are decisions that even people like him can’t come back from, the people who have to mold their entire lives around balancing between the two: the fragile, impossibly thin line between wrong and right. The difference between doing bad things for the right reasons and just doing bad things,  _ period.  _

And she-- the girl--

It’s an  _ accident. _

Steve  _ leaves _ , basically, is the thing, and Bucky doesn’t know how to do anything other than what he’s always done, doesn’t know how to process the gaping, open jaw of his anger stretching wide like a hole in his chest in any other way than exacting revenge on the people he thinks most deserve it, so—

So.

_ So,  _ there’s Bucky, and there’s Sam, and there’s  _ her,  _ which is an addition to their batshit-whatever  _ crime-fighting  _ thing that he really would have hated had she been someone else-- had she been  _ anyone  _ else-- but she isn’t, she’s  _ not _ , the girl is young and pretty and physically, actually small, half his size and likely twice as clever, and Bucky had liked her immediately. It’s remarkably easy, in the days and weeks and months that had followed, to bury his shame and his grief and his  _ loss  _ and focus instead on the easy sight of her across tables scattered with tactical plans and building schematics and  _ very  _ dubiously acquired Glock-19s— she fits so perfectly into the half-life he’d struggled to make for himself that it should have scared him.

It doesn’t.

Or—

Well.

It  _ didn’t. _

Not at first, because the particular fondness he develops for her isn’t immediate— it creeps up on him slowly enough that he can’t pinpoint exactly the moment when it started, can’t quite determine when his fascination with her became a little more complicated and a little less acceptable; only that somewhere along the way it had. It must have. 

And it finally hits him in its entirety one night as he’s staring at her across a dimly lit training ring; he’s had a few too many drinks and laughter is bubbling up slow and liquid like molasses in his chest as she ducks under and around his arm, catching him solidly across the jaw with a padded fist hard enough to send him  _ reeling.  _ She’s never beaten him in hand-to-hand combat before, not once, because no amount of talent can surpass years and years and  _ years  _ of experience, but he’s drunk and she’s  _ good  _ and when she looks up at him, flushed and breathless and smiling so bright that it blinds him—

_ Oh, shit. _

It hits him, then, and it hits him  _ hard. _

It’s like he’s twenty-something-years old again and clinging to the side of a still-moving train— like he’s breathless and dizzy with vertigo, the knowledge that there’s no way out and no way  _ back  _ weighed down heavy and absolute in the pit of his stomach like a cold stone.

Looking at her feels like those moments right before falling. But it’s just moments, and then they’re gone.

“Y’know, you’re— you’re gettin’ pretty good,” he manages to say despite himself, voice sandpaper-hoarse and his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, stumbling over the handful of syllables like he’s forgotten how to speak. How to  _ breathe.  _

And Bucky thinks there are some decisions that even people like him can’t come back from, and he thinks that she’s probably one of them _. _ She is sweet and bright-eyed and reckless and beautiful and makes him feel more alive than he has in the past  _ century  _ and she is so entirely too—

Too young, he thinks, too innocent, too stubbornly, ridiculously  _ good. _

Fuck.

_ Fuck. _

He’s not a bad person.

(He’s going to hell.)

He knows, really,  _ had  _ known, from the moment he’d seen her from across Steve’s bedside in that fucking la-di-doo  _ retirement home _ , that this would end badly. Steve’s just difficult to argue with, is the thing-- had been a hard-headed pain in the ass when he was barely brushing 5’4 and one-ten soaking wet, certainly still  _ is  _ at 90 with all that life behind him-- and he goes and says for her to join him and Sam to go  _ continue his legacy  _ and fuck knows Bucky wasn’t about to argue with a guy who needed a walker, so--

So he said nothing.

So he crushed the thought down and snuffed it out and  _ ignored  _ it, pretended everything was okay and that he was okay and that he didn’t think about her at night in the privacy of his bedroom, laid out alone in the darkness—

And it was fine. It  _ is  _ fine.

Until it isn’t.

Until—

Fucking  _ Sam.  _ Because of course it’s fucking Sam  _ goddamn _ Wilson.

It’s somewhere off the coast of Russia, dead of winter, clearing out a black-market arm dealer’s shipment frate. Nearing the aftermath of a fight, the deck of the ship scattered with scraps of splintered wood and chipped paint, his skin and his clothes and his hair stained with a tacky, tar-black mixture of gunpowder and blood. Snow is coming down thick and heavy, wet flakes mixing with mortar ash and smoke that hangs like a curtain of gray around the ship, obscuring anything more than a few feet from the deck. Bucky can feel it, somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach or maybe in his bones, in his soul, some finely-tuned and violent part of him— he can tell when the fight is over, can taste surrender in the air like iron and rust. 

Sam looks over at him, then, exposing a row of teeth bared in a not-really smile, gets halfway through saying something Bucky assumes is equal parts stone-cold sarcastic and unmeasurable levels of up-his-own-ass, because, you know,  _ of course-- _

He doesn’t see one of the men laid out on the deck— ragged, bloody,  _ beaten—  _ stumbling to his feet until it’s too late.

But the girl does. Somehow. 

(It should have been him.)

Bucky watches the scene unfurl in split-second, fractured snapshots: the slow-motion twitch of the man’s fingers towards a gun holstered around his ankle, the echoing, lead-heavy  _ click  _ as he cocks it, his own voice ran ragged and hoarse shouting for him to  _ move, Sam, get out of the fuckin’ way-- _

It doesn’t do him any good. The warning comes too late, and in any other world that would have been the end of it, but it isn’t. Not this time.

Because the girl— two steps behind them, lingering somewhere in his periphery, always just close enough for him to keep track of but still somehow  _ out of reach— _ the girl moves, into the gaping cavernous  _ space  _ between the gun and the man it’s pointed at, shoves all of her five-foot-something self into the man’s side to push him off balance and into the splintered, broken railing precariously lining the ship’s edge.

The shot cuts into the silence like a knife, serrated and sharp, the bullet lodging itself harmlessly into the deck below them and sending splintered flakes of metal and paint spraying up into the air.

Relief surges up in his chest for a split fraction of a second, and then—

And then the half-caved-in remains of the railing  _ shatter  _ under their combined weight with a crack like a whip or a bone breaking, and before Bucky can think or breathe or  _ move  _ they’ve both gone over the edge. Swallowed up, just like that, in a splash of below-freezing, inky-black water.

Bucky’s breath leaves his body like it’s been sucker-punched right out of his chest.

_ No. _

_ No no no no—  _

_ “ _ —no _.” _

He’s not sure when he made the decision to speak out loud, only that he must have, his voice raspy and shot-through with terror and a ferocious, violent anger that burns white-hot somewhere just above his sternum— anger at himself and at Sam and at the nameless, faceless Russian floating dead in the water below them as he rushes to the edge of the deck. He can’t see her, can hardly see anything past the flurries of ash-grey snow that catch in his hair and his eyelashes, can’t breathe for the pressure over his heart like a dead weight crushing down on his sternum. He’s halfway through shedding his uniform to go after her when Sam stops him, half his clothes already in a pile on the ground.

“I’ll get her,” he says, gripping Bucky’s shoulders and shaking him hard like he’s trying to bring him back to the real world, where this is all important and immediate and  _ happening  _ in a way that he hasn’t quite been able to wrap his head around. “Listen to me.  _ Listen,  _ all right? I’ll bring her back, Barnes. I’ll bring her back.”

“You’d fuckin’  _ better _ ,” Bucky snarls, heart hammering in his throat so hard that he thinks he might throw it up.

The moments after Sam disappears beneath the churning, ice-capped surface of the ocean drag on for so long that it  _ hurts,  _ tears at something inside of him that he doesn’t want to identify, something small and anxious and  _ scared— _

The seconds crawl.

The minutes  _ creep. _

Bucky  _ trembles,  _ quick and staggered breaths making clouds of steam that trail like ghosts in the freezing air. Dread prickles down the back of his spine and raises the hairs on the back of his neck and the torture of not being able to  _ do  _ anything makes his fingers twitch. He’s moments away from diving in after him— regardless of how utterly fucking  _ stupid  _ that would be— when Sam breaks the surface with a heaving, breathless gasp.

“I have her,” he pants through a full-body shiver. “She’s here. G-give me a hand, Barnes, c’mon—“

It takes the two of them to get her back up the ice-encrusted hull of the ship. Sam is shivering—  _ violently—  _ but she isn’t, she’s stone-still, a dead weight in Bucky’s arms as he scoops her soaked body up off of the deck, her head lolling back against his chest. He knows enough about the cold and the sea and how unforgiving both can be to know that this is a  _ bad  _ sign, chokes back the bitter-sour wave of panic that surges up against the back of his throat and threatens to overwhelm him—

“Fuck,” he says, out loud, not sure if he should pray as he walks towards their Quinjet-- not sure if he still believes enough to even conjure up the right words. “Fuck, Sam, we need-- we need blankets, a-- a fire. Somethin’.”

“Barnes,” Sam says, through the jagged sounds of his teeth chattering together, “Is she—“

“Don’t fuckin’ finish that sentence,” he snarls, just as she sputters back to life in his arms, coughing up what feels like half the goddamn Atlantic from her lungs and onto the deck in a motion that wracks her body so violently that he’s glad, for a second, that she’s barely conscious.

“Oh, thank  _ fuck,”  _ Sam pants, somewhere behind him, Bucky can’t be bothered to discern where—

She’s alive, he thinks, relief surging through him nearly hard enough to send him reeling. She’s  _ breathing. _

“Gotta get you dry,” he whispers to her, as the coughing subsides into silence and she droops back into his arms, eyelids fluttering weakly. “You’re gonna be okay, doll, d’you hear me? You’re gonna be _fine.”_

She mumbles something, words slurring, jumbled up and senseless like she can’t figure out how to form them, tripping up and stumbling through a question that she’s already forgotten about by the time it’s halfway out of her mouth. Her eyes are open now, but they’re glazed-over and unfocused in a way that sends solid, sickening pulses of dread ripping through him. Sam opens the boarding ramp to the Quinjet so that they can get her inside; it’s warmer by a few degrees and the sudden heat has her gasping, a painful, sharp sound like somebody had reached down her throat with two hands and tore it out of her. He lays her down flat on a makeshift bed he’d made up of flimsy first aid emergency blankets and his jacket, strips her soaked overcoat from her thin shoulders and uses his dagger to cut away the stiff, frozen layers of her shirt until he can tug her free of it, exposing skin that’s stained blue and red and purple like a whole-body bruise. Her pants come next, cut away with that same hyper-focused precision, and if the whole sight of her, hurt and helpless and still beneath him— if it sends a white-hot tremble of awareness up through his abdomen, then he fucking  _ ignores it.  _ Chokes on it and swallows it down and lets it fucking  _ die. _

Sam helps him to dry her off, wrap her in whatever blankets they have without saying a word. She’s corpse-still on the ground beneath him save for the shallow, too-slow movement of her chest as she breathes, and Bucky feels-- 

Helpless. 

Useless. 

_ Scared.  _

Really, properly scared,  _ deeply  _ scared like he hasn’t been in years, like he hasn’t been since he was a  _ kid.  _ Scared like he used to get when he was still afraid of monsters and bad men and dying--

“Barnes,” Sam says.

“Start the fuckin’ plane, Wilson,” he snaps, trying to ignore how badly his voice is shaking. 

\---------------

There is a safe house in Norway, three hundred and seventy-nine miles away from the last recorded location of the black market arms ship. The Quinjet is fast-- insanely, incredibly,  _ impossibly  _ fast, even for this time, even for a plane-- but it’s not fast enough, and the fourteen minutes and six seconds that it takes to get there feel like they drag on for endless, excruciating hours. Inside, they lay her on the military-style mattress in the only bedroom in the house and start a fire in the dusty hearth. It crackles to life in front of him and Bucky stares at the charcoal-stained bricks thrown into harsh relief behind the flames, unseeing.

“Just gotta wait ‘till she warms up a bit, and we can get going again,” Sam half-whispers, like he’s hesitant to break the silence that had coalesced into an almost physical presence in the cramped confines of the cabin, somehow making the already-small space feel even smaller. 

Bucky swallows, sinks his teeth into the inside of his cheek, anxiety and anger and  _ fear  _ tying knots in the pit of his stomach, constricting around his windpipe, wiring his jaw clenched shut.anxiety and anger and shame tangling and twisting into messy knots in his stomach. He doesn’t respond.

_ Waiting. _

He’s never been very good at that. 

“Barnes— she’s not  _ dead, _ ” Sam says, after a second. “She’ll be okay.”

“I know,” he grits out, after a moment, carding a hand through his close-cropped hair. “I know, but— fuckin’  _ hell,  _ it should’ve been me.” His voice cracks on the last few syllables, and he gives up on trying to keep his shoulders straight, lets his body crumple in on itself like the frame of a car that’s been crushed by a fucking semi truck— if Sam notices, which he does, he says nothing, and Bucky is immeasurably grateful for that.

”I’m gonna go to the jet, see if I can get ahold of anybody,” Sam replies, dusting the thin layer of snow off of his shoulders and looking sideways at Bucky like the other man can’t very easily tell he’s doing it. 

He doesn’t reply. Can’t be bothered to drag his eyes away from the girl huddled on the bed.

Sam sighs, drawn out and long-suffering. “Y’know-- You’re gonna have to tell her someday, man. You can’t keep this up forever,” he says, voice softening; he doesn’t elaborate what he’s talking about but he doesn’t have to. The silence continues, but this time it’s  _ deafening,  _ broken only by the creaking of the rusted-shut hinges when Sam pulls the door open.

Bucky turns to stare at his retreating back and struggles to form the words that are stuck to the roof of his mouth, bulky and unfamiliar—

“Sam,” he says quietly. 

Sam turns. Raises an eyebrow.

“Thank you.”

A too-quiet moment stretches between them before he gives Bucky the briefest of nods, expression surprisingly gentle and  _ impossibly _ understanding, and pulls the door closed behind him.

And then there’s another moment, a longer moment, a  _ stranger  _ one, where it’s just him and her, asleep—  _ unconscious—  _ in the bed, the silence and the space between them both equally as stifling. 

_ All we can do is wait. _

So Bucky waits.

Time feels simultaneously too slow and too fast; it could have been a few minutes or it could have been an hour, maybe more, before he finally takes the spot next to her on the bed. Gently, he presses the back of his hand to her forehead— she’s still cool, but not that brittle, deathly kind of cold that she had been, the kind of cold that had set vicious, desperate alarm bells ringing through his head and made his stomach feel like it had dropped out through his feet. He huffs out a sigh, half relieved and the other half something he can’t—  _ won’t— _ identify.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he whispers, to an unconscious girl and an empty room, but mostly just to himself.

Bucky rakes his eyes down over her carefully, like he could break her, sick as she is right now, with the weight of his gaze alone. It’s not really a conscious decision to move his hand down from her forehead to her cheek, it just  _ happens,  _ and he’s half-stunned at just how much of her he can cover with the spread of his palm, and when she presses into the warmth of his hand with a soft, shuddering exhale he chokes on his own breathing like he’s forgotten how to after twenty some-odd years of doing it without so much as a second thought.

(And he hates it— furiously, fiercely hates it— that her first instinct is to lean into him. Wishes she would do anything but that.)

“Barnes?” She mumbles, blinking up at him, eyelashes stuck together with brine and sweat and seawater, her voice raw and words slurring in a way that tells him she’s not really all the way back yet. Her expression is slack and unfocused and she’s not really herself, he can tell, not the way that he knows her-- bright and energetic and smarter than a whip, certainly smarter than him and Sam and probably even both of them put together, if he’s being honest. The girl in the bed in front of him isn’t that-- she’s frail and tired and  _ small,  _ and Bucky fights down the sudden, paralyzing need to look away. It feels wrong, looking at her like this, like he’s staring wide-eyed into the sun.

Bucky swallows back a lump of something unidentifiable in his throat and when he speaks his voice is rougher than he’d meant for it to be. “It’s all right, doll. You fell off the boat saving Sam’s dumb ass, you remember? Don’t you worry about that, though, all right? Doesn’t matter. You’re gonna be _ fine _ . Promise. You just-- you just rest.”

“‘M cold,” she says slowly—  _ too  _ slowly— and when an awful, bone-wracking shiver spasms through her body, his teeth snap together so hard that it sends a lancing pain through the muscle of his jaw. He tries to think of how to help her, how to make it  _ better-- _ he’s certain he knows this somewhere, but his mind is broadcasting nothing but static on a frantic, directionless loop.

“Hold on,” Bucky says, standing up too fast; his voice sounds strangled even to his own ears. There’s one of those stupid little one-dose medicine packets for combat injuries in the first aid kit he had brought in with his jacket, and he scrambles uselessly for it, irritation at his own incompetence a hot, heavy weight in his stomach. She tries to pull herself up on the single, cardboard-stiff pillow as he sits down in the space beside her, but she can’t quite muster up the strength she needs to support her own weight and collapses back into the blankets, boneless and limp.

“Here,” Bucky says, trembling hands unsealing the plastic medicine vial with a soft  _ pop.  _ “C’mon, sweetheart, drink.”

She does, and something about her easy compliance makes the muscles in his abdomen  _ twist _ . He watches her throat working until he can’t stand it anymore and forces himself to look away, fingers twitching against the duvet cover as he swallows around nothing but air.

It’s not going to work immediately, he knows this, reminds himself of it as she presses herself closer to him, a misshapen, trembling lump underneath the pile of blankets, trying to ignore the way his own heartbeat stutters and stumbles and  _ speeds up  _ in response.

“‘M still cold,” she mumbles, hollow and small, curling in on herself until all he can see of her beneath the covers is the bare curve of her shoulder and a too-pale cheek. It’s intimate and undignified and Bucky suddenly can’t bear to see it, so he stares at his own lap instead.

“I know, doll, I know,” Bucky says, helpless, unsure of whether or not he should move away as she inches closer— it’s warm, suddenly, too-hot and sluggish, so he stands up to shed his sweater for the thinner thermal-knit henley underneath. She makes a soft murmured noise of distress as his weight leaves her side, and the sound of it makes him flinch, fingers twitching unconsciously at his side, tapping a rapid, staccato rhythm against the rough fabric of his combat uniform.

“You should really, uh, try and— try and get some sleep, all right, doll?” he rasps, staring down at her— he wants to reach out, to touch her trembling shoulder, the curve of her spine exposed above the blanket tucked beneath her arm, but Bucky bites down on the urge because it’s fucking  _ selfish,  _ isn’t it? He already feels like he’s doing something he shouldn’t just by standing there. Like he’s walking on a tightrope, muscles tense with trepidation, unable to see what’s on either side of him, always one misstep away from falling. Like he’s doing something  _ wrong.  _ Like something’s gone missing or broken inside of him and it’s slowly swelling and surging and  _ pushing _ up against his skin like a bruise and it’s all her fault.

Except it’s  _ not.  _ And he  _ knows  _ that. 

Sam shouldn’t have left him alone. He needs to get the fuck  _ out  _ of there.

Bucky exhales, steels himself, and takes the first half-step towards the door where he hopes, a little desperately, the cold will shock his system, maybe help him get a fucking  _ grip— _

“What’re you… d-don’t— don’t go,” she slurs— _ whines— _ into the wide and endless silence that had spread like a chasm between them, a small, cold hand snaking out and swiping at the air for him, clumsily closing around his wrist. “Stay.” 

Against his better judgement Bucky lets himself turn-- just one look at her, just one more, he tells himself, half-sick by how clearly he knows it’s a lie-- and she’s looking up at him, imploring, her eyes are half-lidded and her pupils blown out so wide they look like planets. He knows in the part of his brain that’s still working that the medicine must be working now, knows that she must not be entirely aware of him or herself or the places where they are suddenly skin to skin, her palm cool and soft against his forearm, but—

Bucky swallows, off-balance,  _ helpless, _ not sure of anything. Not if he’s giving up or giving in, captivated or maybe just  _ captive. _

“All right,” he whispers, voice brittle. “‘m right here, doll. I’ll stay, all right? I’m not— not goin’ anywhere.”

He tells himself he doesn’t know why he moves to lock the door to the cabin, sliding the crossbar into place, and maybe he doesn’t. But maybe he  _ does _ , though, he thinks-- and then he thinks about the gut-wrenching pang of terror that had accompanied the sight of her falling over the ship’s railing and he thinks about Sam alone in the Quinjet and he thinks about him before, saying  _ you’re gonna have to tell her someday— _

_ It doesn’t matter right now, _ he tells himself, and for a second he almost believes it.

He sits back down beside her on the twin-size mattress and makes sure to keep a respectable distance between his body, too warm, and hers, still trembling. She leans towards him as soon as he relaxes and Bucky tenses up like he’s been stuck by a live wire, tells himself that her instinctive reaction is because she’s still cold and he’s the nearest available heat source-- it feels like every inch of his body is practically radiating with it, sticky and uncomfortable.

Bucky reaches a hand out, willing it to stop shaking as his fingers ghost gently over her forehead, not even applying enough pressure for it to really qualify as a full, solid  _ touch  _ as he brushes the salt-damp, tangled curls of her hair away from her eyes. There’s a trace of a smile on her face, the corners of her mouth twitching up just a little, and the sight of it causes something in his chest to twist.  _ Tighten.  _ It hurts him to see her like this, her body melted into the bed, languid and relaxed without the usual alertness that normally occupies her— it feels fucking  _ weird.  _ She makes a noise, then, she shivers and curls even closer to him, and he has to fight the very real urge to  _ run,  _ run fast and run far and just fucking  _ get away,  _ because she’s drugged and sick and  _ not herself  _ and he’s equal parts ashamed and  _ terrified  _ at how often he needs to remind himself of that. 

“Barnes,” she mumbles into the duvet, words trailing off, the silence slowly solidifying like wet concrete between them. He suppresses the nervous urge to clear his throat, shuffle his feet, do  _ anything  _ to diffuse the tension that hums underneath his skin in every fibre of his muscles. There’s heat pooling somewhere low in his stomach. It’s searing. Unavoidable. His heart is hammering too fast, sick with anticipation, fluttering like hummingbird wings against his ribs. If she had been in a clearer state of mind, he thinks, she would be able to hear it.

“Barnes,” she starts, again, words sticky-slow and barely lucid. “‘S really— _ really _ cold.”

Bucky sucks in a breath through his teeth. He’s not sure who moves first, if it was him laying back against the mattress or her curling up against his side, but she’s suddenly close enough that he can see the pin-pricks of goosebumps as they flare up and across her the bare skin of her shoulder blades. She’s not wearing anything but underwear, he remembers suddenly, mouth gone bone-dry, and her body is blissfully cool against his own even through the layers of his clothes. 

“You’re warm,” she whispers, pressing herself into him. Bucky bites out a laugh. The sound comes out choked-up and broken like he’s got fucking  _ knives _ lining his windpipe or something. It almost feels like there might be. There’s a tension headache beginning to throb somewhere behind his left temple and he means to raise a hand to rub at it—  _ really,  _ really, he really does— but his fingers brush her knee in the process, and it’s like he’s drawn to her, helplessly,  _ hopelessly,  _ his hand settling heavier, from fingertips to palm to a solid, warm weight curling across her calf—

There’s quiet moment after that, filled with the sound of his own heartbeat and nerves and it’s fucking  _ strange,  _ isn’t it, how resigned he is to this, an illusion of a choice that he’s not even sure he’s really making. A choice that feels like it was made  _ for  _ him, before all of this, maybe when she fell into the ice or maybe even before that, when he saw her for the first time and felt something break inside of him, a slow creeping hairline fracture leaking longing into his bloodstream like an oil spill.

None of this is new to him, this  _ wanting,  _ but there’s something terrifyingly final about it, the cool presence of her skin beneath his palm a strange anchor. It’s easy—  _ so  _ fucking  _ easy—  _ to slide his hand up, curling around the width of her thigh, fingers spread wide like he’s trying to touch as much of her as he possibly can, the heat of him seeping into her like an iron brand. She makes an inquisitive noise and shifts in the bed, looks at him for a searing split-second, eyes soft and unassuming and  _ heavy  _ with an emotion that he doesn’t want to acknowledge or place or bother finding the words for.

(Trust. She trusts him. That’s what it is, and it makes him feel like he’s breaking wide open)

“Barnes?” she whispers, and this time it’s a question-- this time he can  _ feel  _ the weight of her gaze pricking hotly on his neck. It burns into him, her eyes wide and dark somewhere in his periphery. Bucky stares hard at the bed, the rhythm of his own heartbeat like gunfire in his ears. 

He doesn’t answer.

“Bucky,” she says, then, into the silence, soft and small like she’s not quite sure if it fits right in her mouth— and the sound of it makes him want to bolt out of the room, off of the ship, out of his life and his own  _ skin  _ and into a universe where the half-drunk slur of his name didn’t hit him like a punch to the gut.

She places her hand over his, just for a lingering, too-brief second, and it’s soft and cool and gentle for every inch of him that isn’t.

“Sweetheart,” he whispers.

_ You have no idea what you’ve done to me,  _ he doesn’t say out loud. It repeats in his head regardless, the words ringing like a chant, like a prayer, tinged with something bordering on panic.

He can hardly bring himself to look at her.

(He doesn’t move away.)

Her underwear are still half-damp and the slope between her stomach and the waistband of them is soft and smooth and tensing,  _ taut,  _ as he slides his hand further up and around the back of her thigh, pressing his fingers in, kneading and pulling like he wants to take her apart and put her back together again all at once. He’s close enough now that he can feel the rhythmic rise-and-fall of her chest against his side as she breathes, and he latches on to the steadiness of it, not sure if it makes him feel better or worse. It feels like reality should be tearing at the edges for what he’s doing, forcing two parallel universes to collide— the one where he has imagined this scenario over countless sleepless nights in which giving in seemed easier than fighting, and the one where this is  _ happening _ , here and now and  _ real. _

His fingers shake as he hooks them through the seam of her underwear. She shifts a little without protesting as he eases them down past her knees, her calves, the still too-cold bones of her ankles. The moment unfolds so slowly that for a second it feels like he isn’t moving at all, like neither of them are even so much as breathing, the weight of his palm against her skin a snapshot suspended in time.

A part of him wishes this wasn’t so  _ effortless. _

(Because it is. It’s as easier than breathing, it’s easier than fucking  _ living  _ has been for the last half-century, and it terrifies him.)

His other hand slides across her ribs, moving up across the soft swell of her chest, the rough pad of his thumb brushing over the peak of her nipple— and when she sighs into him he swallows it whole, drinks up the sound of it and tucks it away in some quiet, empty place within him alongside all the other things he tries so hard not to think about. Without really even thinking about it he shifts up so that he’s taking the space between her knees and his body is above hers, the whole of her is spread out beneath him, her stomach tensing beneath the weight of his palm. It’s so easy to just keep taking more— he’s greedy and he’s  _ guilty  _ but he just can’t fucking  _ help  _ himself and it’s his own goddamn fault. Bucky presses his mouth to her sternum before he can muster up enough self-control to convince himself not to, and then again to the curve of her breast, a third time closing his lips and his tongue down over the hard peak of her nipple and  _ god  _ she jolts at that,  _ whines _ , her too-cold hands coming up to grip weakly at his forearms—

“Hey, s’ all right, doll,” he murmurs against her skin, and he hates himself for it, but not enough for it to make a difference. Bucky smooths a rough palm down over her ribs, across the curve of her hip, five white pressure points blooming around the warmth of his touch as he digs his fingers into her skin just shy of too-hard, like he’s trying to relieve the weight of his own shame. His hand roams down and down and  _ down  _ almost without any conscious thought, until he’s brushing through a curl of dark hair and bare skin at the crux of her thighs and her muscles tremble and tighten in response as she pulls in a breath—

She’s wet, he realizes, his fingers come away slick-shiny and  _ god,  _ he’s aching from want of her, almost more than he can stand, his cock a hard, solid line against the rough seam of his pants. Bucky reaches to touch her before he can even try to fight it; gently, at first,  _ tentative _ , anticipation trembling in his abdomen— but it’s impossible to miss the way she squirms up as the pad of his thumb strokes sticky and wet across her clit, so he does it  _ again,  _ over and around and pressing down just hard enough that her hips twitch and her body trembles and it draws out a sound from her chest, something so soft and sweet that he wants to memorize it and possess it and  _ keep  _ it like a secret between them. 

She doesn’t tell him to stop.

Bucky pushes his hands further up the insides of her thighs, spreading her open to the heavy, consuming weight of his gaze. 

“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful,” he whispers, not quite loud enough for her to hear, momentarily blindsided by how much he fucking  _ means  _ it. His chest feels tight, constricted, like he’s fighting against a solid lead weight every time he tries to draw in a breath, and his skin, he thinks, surely must be on fire, burning up underneath the thick layers of his clothes. He wants to know what she tastes like. Wants to put his mouth on her, slowly, methodically, until she’s trembling underneath him, wants to know what she looks like when she—

“Bucky,” she says again. The muscles in her thighs tremble, tendons strung out taut beneath his hands. Her voice is small and it doesn’t so much break the silence as much as it slips in through the cracks in it, breathless. Bucky doesn’t respond to her— _ can’t _ , even if he knew what to say, tongue heavy and immobile like a stone behind his teeth— but takes the pause to strip off his shirt, trying to relieve the feverish crawl of warmth that spreads across his chest, his shoulders, his abdomen. It lands in a heap somewhere vaguely near the door and then he’s leaning back over her again, weight resting on his palms on either side of her head, the breadth of him nearly eclipsing her underneath him-- blocking her out of view like she’s the fucking  _ sun,  _ impossible and larger-than-life and absolutely  _ effervescent.  _ Her eyes are almost closed and the sliver of her pupils still visible is blown out wide and dark; they’re only a few inches apart and Bucky wants to kiss her so badly that it almost blinds him— her forehead, her cheek, the corner of her lips, her open mouth.

He doesn’t. He is tired of this— tired of wanting things from her. Wishes he was stronger, but it’s a halfhearted thought and it doesn’t fool his conscience, not as he pulls himself away and down the length of her body and presses his mouth to the bone of her ankle, cool beneath his touch. She trembles, her sudden inhale at the contact quick and unsteady. Bucky does it again, this time to the side of her calf, beneath a bruise blossoming dark and swollen across her skin— and then again to the crook of her knee, the tight stretch of the tendon there. Her breath hitches, and his hand finds her hip, presses down to keep her still as her muscles strain, tense and twitching underneath his palm. She makes a sound when his lips graze the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, some strung-out, high-pitched whimper that catches around a sigh at the sudden warmth of his mouth, and it’s all Bucky can do to keep himself silent, breath leaving him like it’s been punched out of his chest. 

He swallows around pangs of uncertainty and longing and ever-present  _ shame—  _ around nothing at all, really, not even air— and he sucks a bruise in, just gently, wanting to draw that noise out of her again and again and again until he has it memorized, until it’s  _ his— _

His teeth scrape over the mark that he left and Bucky can taste salt and brine, skin and sweetness as she shudders, a whole-body tremor, jerking up against the steady weight of his hands on her hips that anchors her to the bed. The next press of his mouth slides further up the curve of her thigh, inch by inch, the process methodical and painstakingly deliberate. When another shiver rattles through her she whispers something senseless that he can’t hear, her hands timidly crawling their way up his arms, across the bridge of his shoulders, stroking through his hair— he’s so hard that it _hurts_ and it’s all he has left not to drown in the fondness that surges up inside him like fresh blood welling from an old wound.

Bucky lets go of her hips to hitch her legs up, spread her thighs wide, one hand returning to hold her still and the other sliding down to touch her, palm flat and fingers stroking over the slippery-slick heat of her entrance— and he can feel the muscles there clench and flutter and  _ tighten  _ around nothing, can’t help but imagine what it might feel like around his cock as much as the thought doesn’t belong in his head.

Another kiss to the crux of her thigh, then, close enough that he feels like he can taste her in the air, in the ragged breaths he takes in, and then he’s pushing a finger into the warm wet clutch of her cunt and he can feel how tight she is even from that— she constricts around him when his thumb presses back against the swollen-hot nub of her clit and her fingers dig into his hair, a needy sound piercing the silence as he murmurs useless, comforting things against the curve of her hip without even bothering to stop himself.  _ You’re so fucking perfect. So good for me. Look at you, god, baby, you have no idea what you’ve done to me. Got me all fuckin’ messed up. _

She pushes up into the heat of his palm in small, helpless motions, against the finger crooked inside of her and the rough pad of his thumb, and Bucky  _ knows  _ he could get her off like this, make her come for him, and then— and then—

And then it would be done, over with, because he has already taken more than he should have— more than he  _ meant  _ to, he realizes, wondering blankly when simply wanting something stopped being enough.

Bucky presses in another finger, feels her tense around the stretch of it, the trembling of her thigh as he runs his palm down the muscle, mouth pressed to the slope of her stomach as he fucks her open. He closes his eyes; like this, everything is strangely amplified. His breathing, heavy and ragged, hers, light and fast, the lightning pinpricks of her nails as they dig into his scalp, release, dig in again—

He crooks his fingers up and presses down with his thumb and she makes a soft, wet sound above him, shivers working through her body like tremors after a bomb goes off, the whole of her trembling the same way the ground did that day in Wakanda, the same way it must have at the UN, the entire situation unfolding before him almost like its own kind of disaster.

“Bucky,” she whispers, stroking his hair. His name drips off of her tongue, soft and honey-sweet, tenderly enough that he doesn’t want to look at her and see the kindness that he knows will be there; he still does anyway, and the sight of her alone is enough to make him _ ache _ . “I want—“ 

“Anything,” he says, before he can stop himself— before he can even  _ consider  _ stopping himself, the word wrenched out of some dark and secretive part of him that he’s mostly given up trying to ignore.

“Please,” she says. It’s insistent, voice hitching— catching—  _ breaking _ around a trembling gasp as she tightens down around his fingers and rocks her hips up and rakes the blunted edges of her nails through his hair—

And deep down he knows what she wants, but still forces himself to look at her anyway. Has to be certain. Has to be  _ sure. _ Behind her eyes, wide and dark, there’s his own desire reflected back at him, in the desperate, needy way her fingers wind tighter in his hair, the stumbling tremble of her pulse beneath her skin— far away he thinks that neither of them are in their right minds, farther away he  _ knows  _ he should feel complicit,  _ ashamed,  _ wonders how he could have let himself arrive at this moment, barely tethered to reality, but right now—

Right now, Bucky presses his nose to the crook of her hip and breathes out harshly, allows himself a few seconds of this, the warmth of her underneath him and this moment suspended between one action and the next, happening continually or maybe never quite happening at all.

“Please,” she says, softer, this time, fingers sinking into his hair and pushing him lower with enough intent for it to be unmistakable.

“Yeah,” Bucky whispers against the mark he’d left, spit-shiny and bruised on the inside of her thigh, her pulse hammering beneath it. “Yeah, doll, I got you, ‘m right— right here. Gonna take care of you. Gonna take  _ good  _ care of you, promise, okay?”

She nods and releases the breath she’d been holding, the little needy tremble of her bottom lip as she watches him nearly enough to break him right then and there.

And this— just like everything else, he thinks, sinking down her body, not once looking away from her hazy, half-lidded eyes as she tracks the steady descent of his mouth and the part of his lips— this shouldn’t be so fucking easy.

The noise she makes when he presses his mouth down over her clit—finally, _finally—_ it might have been a sob, keening and raw like he’d torn it right out of her chest. His reaction is immediate, like the sound of her breaks down whatever small amount of self control he still had left, like the echo of her moans in his ears somehow relieves him of responsibility, excuses what he’s done and what he’s _going_ to do—

_ Fuck. _

Bucky curls his arms under her legs and hitches her trembling thighs wide open with the width of his shoulders and pulls her closer _ ,  _ his own answering groan as her muscles tighten and her body arches into the heat of his mouth lost in a mindless, wordless vibration against her cunt. He has his fingers inside of her still and he presses them in,  _ up,  _ drags his tongue up in one broad, flat stroke and  _ god _ the taste of her alone is nearly enough to make him dizzy, dazed,  _ drunk— _

The sound that breaks out of her when his mouth seals over her clit and when he sucks at it and follows with a gentle nip of his teeth— it hits him  _ hard,  _ the burning-bright pressure of his own arousal knotted tight in his stomach suddenly almost too much to bear, his entire body buzzing and alight with just how badly he wants this. Wants anything she’ll give him. __

“Bucky,” she gasps,  _ cries,  _ her cheeks burning up and her toes curling on his shoulders; she’s trying to rock up against him but his grip is too tight and she’s not going anywhere, not now, not with his tongue curling around her clit with just enough pressure to make her  _ shake _ , body strung tight like a bowstring underneath his mouth. 

“‘S okay, sweetheart, that’s it— fuck, yeah, you’re— you’re so fuckin’ good, baby,” he murmurs against her skin, sinking his teeth into the soft inner part of her thigh, voice raw and low and chest-deep as he fucks her open with his fingers, the slick sound of it— of  _ her,  _ of how desperately, treacherously wet she is for him,  _ because  _ of him—filthy and almost too-loud in the otherwise silent cabin. She  _ whines  _ at the loss of his mouth and Bucky can’t help the breathless, awed chuckle that rolls out of him, smooth and low as he kisses back down to her cunt, licking up and over and around her clit until her thighs are trembling and closing up around his head—

And—

_ Yes,  _ he thinks, the thought hazy and far-away.  _ Yes. _

When she comes, then, against his mouth and his tongue, it’s like the world stops and narrows down to a needlepoint— like the only thing that exists is her, the arch of her spine, the muscles in her legs and her stomach and her thighs as they go all tense and taut, easing into a liquid tremble that works itself through her in waves until she’s a mess underneath him. She collapses, trembling, back to the bed, slowly relaxes her clenched-tight fists in his hair— and when he places one more open-mouthed kiss right above her clit she shivers at the sudden press of his tongue,  _ whimpers,  _ crying out when he licks over it, just once more, just  _ gently-- _

He sits up after that, watching her, the image of her flushed and spread out on the bed drifting in and out of focus, the aftershocks spidering through her like flickering veins of lightning through a storm-dark sky. When he rests his weight on his palms on either side of her head and leans over her again to press his mouth to her temple, he tells himself it’s not a kiss, hoping she’s as easily fooled as his own conscience. Bucky allows a handful of seconds to pass before he pulls away, intent on memorizing the soft, cool presence of her body underneath his, close enough that he’s aware of her even in the spaces where their skin isn’t touching. 

She reaches out for him just as he starts to move away. Finds his shoulder even with her eyes half-closed as they are, trailing her fingers down over the weather-rugged expanse of his bicep. Bucky isn’t quite sure of what either of them are doing now, only that he’s still hard and she’s tugging him in closer and her breath is warm and shallow against his neck, sending prickles of awareness  _ drip-drip-dripping  _ down his spine like water.

She touches his face, his cheek, the stubble along the sharp edge of his jaw, traces a trembling finger across the scar that lances through his right eyebrow, just thin enough that you can only really make it out up close. Bucky wants to kiss her so fiercely that he’s shaking from the need of it; the aching desire to turn his head and close that infinitesimal distance between them pounding in his chest right alongside his own heartbeat. It feels like every fibre of his body is straining towards her until he’s coming apart at the seams, everything he is and was and would ever be scattering into nothing but mindless longing.

“‘You just— you get some rest, now, doll,” he murmurs, voice raspy, soft and low, but she squirms underneath him and makes a sound that’s slurred and vaguely petulant, looking up at him with her eyes drowsy and half-closed and her pupils blown out so far they’re only a slender ring of color left around deep, endless black, and it’s enough that Bucky  _ hesitates _ , as much as he knows that he shouldn’t _. _

Everything after that feels muddy and slowed-down, each moment fracturing into split-second fragments like a dusty slowed-down film reel from before. She curls her hand around the back of his neck. Looks up at him. Pulls him down, in the same moment that her eyes flutter closed, and then she’s tilting her head  _ up  _ and she’s threading her fingers through his hair, turning towards him the way a fucking flower turns towards the sun--

In some distant part of his brain that’s still functioning he  _ understands _ , even if he does nothing to stop it, what’s going to happen in the next few seconds.

The kiss is slow, is  _ hesitant,  _ he’s shaking and his breathing is stilted as her lips brush over hisjust long enough for him to make sure he can memorize it, sear the moment into his fucking  _ brain stem _ if he has to, just to get the chance to relive it again-- her mouth softer and smaller and  _ sweeter  _ under his and the taste of sea salt and strawberry chapstick and her hands, one in his hair at the nape of his neck and the other cupping his jaw, her thumb stroking over the curve of his cheekbone--

Her lips part underneath his for a sound, a shaky, rushed exhale of the breath she’d been holding as her fingers wind tighter into his hair.

And, oh,  _ Jesus,  _ Bucky thinks, his own breathing coming in sharp, short bursts. 

“ _ Don’t,”  _ he manages, strangled, but it comes out quiet and the words don’t carry nearly as much weight as they should, not as he tries  _ so fucking hard  _ to remind himself of her current state of mind, even as the thought becomes distressingly difficult to keep ahold of. 

She runs a hand down over the bunched-up muscles of his side, the burning, flushed expanse of his chest, the other digging blunted nails into his back as she presses her lips to the corner of his mouth again instead of answering. It feels like he’s pushing himself against some sort of invisible tide, sluggish and stagnant as the world around him slips by, the seconds too fleeting for him to grasp or begin to make sense of. His mouth opens around a protest that never makes it past his throat, catching there as he inhales a slow, shivering breath. They share air for a second— less than that, really— as he holds himself motionless above her, the muscles in his arms and his shoulders bunched and trembling from the strain of it, and then—

And then he kisses her back. Because it’s  _ easy.  _ It’s easier than leaving and easier than saying no and easier than  _ pretending,  _ pretending like he does every single fucking day and like he’ll do for the rest of his goddamn  _ life;  _ pretending that he doesn’t want her and that this invisible, impossible line between them hasn’t already been crossed, won’t be crossed again, and again, and  _ again— _

So Bucky kisses her. So he kisses her like he’s been  _ aching  _ to do it, like he might never get another chance, like he’s trying to open her up underneath him until he can pour every goddamn ounce of his longing into her before it burns an iron-hot hole straight through his chest. And it’s relief and it’s closure and it’s like he’s admitting to a weakness or a secret that wasn’t even really a secret at all, the way his need for her thrums in every part of him— in the scrape of his teeth across her bottom lip and the slick soothing apology of his tongue chasing after it, curling into her mouth, the desperate shift of his hands to her hips to pull her down the length of his body until he fits into the space between her thighs.

_ Yes, _ he thinks, the thought far-away and blurry because there’s friction,  _ finally,  _ his cock pressed down between the spread of her legs just hard enough to wind the coil of arousal in his gut even tighter, breath leaving him as a hiss through his gritted teeth as he tries— _ fails—  _ to fight the urge to  _ chase  _ it, the tiny telltale flicker of pleasure coiling at the base of his spine—

She whines at the weight of him pinning her to the bed when he grinds into her and Bucky drinks up the sound from her mouth like it’s oxygen, like he  _ needs  _ it, chases the noise as her body tenses and liquifies beneath him all at once. The cold edge of his belt buckle bites into her stomach as he rocks his hips forward again, and he nearly breaks wide open when she reaches for it, heat spilling through him and his heart in his throat as her fingers stumble over the stiff black leather, has to grit his teeth to bite back a sound that he’d be ashamed of if there were anything left of him.

Bucky sits up and pulls away, kneeling over her before she can make the decision to touch him, maybe out of fear or maybe from something else entirely, replaces her hands with his bigger, rougher ones, trembling against the dull silver clasp for a half-second too long before he works it open. The rasp of his belt as he pulls it through the loops is almost obscenely loud in the surrounding quiet, and the sound shatters it into pieces-- breaks that heavy, omnipresent  _ stillness,  _ the silence that had allowed him to convince himself that this wasn’t real-- along with whatever remains of his self control. Not this world, Bucky thinks of this particular chain of events, curling up the belt into a neat little spiral. Not this lifetime, not her and him and certainly not like this—like it’s a mantra or a lifeline or some ridiculous, inane way to soothe his conscience. But it’s  _ real  _ and it’s  _ happening  _ as much as he wishes it wasn’t—thinks it  _ shouldn’t— _ his shaking hands fumbling with the buttons on his pants, pushing them down to his knees as he braces back over her and kisses her  _ again,  _ his lips slanting over hers, stealing the breath from her lungs until they’re both dizzy from it. 

Her mouth breaks away from his with a pleading sort of noise, something needy and mindless like she doesn’t even know what she’s asking for, just that it’s something, anything,  _ more.  _ Bucky’s never been one to deny her, can’t seem to say no even if she asks for the world-- so all it takes is the weight of her hands at his shoulders urging him down for him to give in, to close the cold, empty space between the bulk of his body and hers, small and shivering beneath him. She arches up and into him when he does with the sweetest little sigh, hooking her ankles around his legs to bring him closer, pressing her face into the side of his neck, her mouth cool and wet against the crook of his collarbone. He's so fucking hard that it hurts, it  _ aches,  _ all the way down to his bones, drags a curse out of him that’s more gravel than words as he presses his mouth to her neck. Like this, all but skin to skin, the bulk of his cock is pressed iron-hot against her cunt, separated only by the flimsy fabric of his underwear that’s already sticky and soaked-through from how wet she is— and the friction and the closeness are both too much and not enough at the same time, want and guilt and  _ need  _ tangling up in his stomach until he can’t stand to separate them anymore. He’s breathing hard and burning up and trembling from the strain of his own stillness, and when she drags him down to kiss him it’s such a sweet thing that he can feel it splinter his resolve down into nothing. He grinds himself into her with a trembling, wrenched-out curse, and the sudden pressure of his cock dragging slippery-wet cotton over her cunt shocks a hitching, desperate breath out of her chest that he steals right out of her mouth. Her hips roll up against him in little, mindless movements and he can’t find it in him to bother focusing on anything else except how warm and wet and perfect that friction feels, even as little as it is, even through his underwear, can’t tear his gaze away from the sight of her underneath him with her eyes half-closed and her lashes full and dark as her hips move up against his again, urging him on, a little roll up into the heady, hot weight of his cock, the bulk of it between her spread-wide legs— 

“Bucky,” she whispers, voice affectionate,  _ adoring,  _ slurred out, more moan than words as she tilts her head to kiss him again—and he  _ hates  _ it, he hates the way that it drags his heart up through his throat like the serrated edge of a knife and he hates how it sends a pulse of warmth through him that makes the muscles in his abdomen twist and tighten and  _ ache,  _ hates how he doesn’t fight it when she uses the leverage of her hands on his shoulders to roll up against the length of him like she’s chasing the same feeling he is— that slick, maddening heat of anticipation winding tight and then  _ tighter  _ in the pit of his stomach with every slow-ticking second. 

Bucky trails his mouth down to her neck, to the fluttering tremble of her pulse point hammering beneath thin, sensitive skin, and closes his eyes. It’s easier like this, when he’s not looking at her, but it doesn’t stop the broken-record scratch of _god_ _what am I doing what have I done_ that plays on repeat through his skull, can’t quell the shame that burns through him because there’s a word for this, for what he feels for her, and even if he’ll never say it out loud he knows what it is, just as he knows that she never will. It _aches,_ somewhere low in his chest when she pulls him in until his mouth is on hers again, but it still fuels his desire, a frantic white-hot pressure on his vocal cords that had never really disappeared or faltered no matter his guilt— just curled itself up in a tense, trembling coil like a snake ready to spring forwards and close its open jaws around her _._ Because that’s the thing with wanting, he knows, with _taking_ , that the more he consumes to feed that starving creature inside of him the more it takes to sate it, each time. 

It’s never enough— she arches up off the bed into him and he pulls her even closer with one broad hand splayed across her lower back, greedily tracing the notches of her spine, each individual vertebrae, trying to touch as much of her skin as she’ll allow him to as he grinds the cotton-covered bulge of his cock down between her legs. Like this, she can’t see his hand as it trembles down the slope of his abdomen, can’t see his shaking hesitation as he runs the waistband of his underwear between the pad of his thumb and forefinger, tugging at it, trying his conscience, wanting her and hating it and hating  _ himself  _ for not doing a good enough job of it in the first place. For it not being enough to stop him.

Bucky shoves his underwear down past his knees in a burst of impulsivity and the sudden chill of the air sends goosebumps spilling up the backs of his arms, across his shoulders, has him feeling bare and exposed and  _ defenseless  _ in a way that’s entirely too human, too  _ real,  _ he has to swallow around his heartbeat that feels like it’s pressing right up against his jugular—

In front of him she spreads her knees wider and he can’t help but reach out, feeling the tremble along the insides of them as he does. She’s not looking at him, not really, eyes slipping shut and then blinking back open again, unfocused, and that’s enough to spur him into thinking that he should  _ leave,  _ should save whatever remains of his conscience, let her rest—

“Bucky,” she mumbles, and then she’s shifting herself down the bed until she can reach out and touch him, dragging her hand up the expanse of his abdomen, the ridges of muscle there that tense up tight under the ghosting, feather-light brush of her fingertips. His breath leaves him in a rough, shaking exhale as she hooks her ankles around the backs of his thighs to urge him back down, and he’s powerless, for a second, can’t bring himself to do anything to stop her. His cock is trapped between them like this, heavy and hot against her belly, until she plants her feet on the mattress for leverage and pushes herself up and urges the length of him down so that it fits right between her thighs with a gasp and a shiver and a noise like a whine that rips itself from the back of her throat, needy and soft—

And then there’s a tentative roll of her hips into him, a slippery, wet heat against his cock, a tremble she hides in the curve of his neck as the length of it slides over her cunt, back and forth again and again and again and  _ oh,  _ fuck, he thinks. Bucky rumbles out a groan when she pulls him in closer, all aching and empty and desperate for more friction, more pressure, more  _ anything— _

“Sweetheart,” he chokes out, voice raw and broken and so fucking full of shame that for a moment Bucky doesn’t recognize it as his own, not even sure if he means to speak out loud, not sure if he wants to say  _ no  _ or  _ don’t _ or  _ yes  _ or  **_please—_ **

Her mouth opens to answer him but he kisses her before she gets the chance, captures whatever she was going to say alongside a helpless, instinctive intake of breath. She leans up into it like she’s trying to get closer,  _ nearer _ , like she wants to be swallowed up in him and he wants to  _ let  _ her, wants to believe that this is the universe where it’s what she wants—

“You’re gonna be the death of me, I fuckin’ swear to god, doll,” Bucky whispers, strangled, moving his mouth to her temple and taking in a ragged, trembling breath. He’s so fucking hard that his cock twitches with his heartbeat, thick and hot between her legs as she squirms, shifts up, the head of it bumping her clit and then sliding lower—

The sound he makes in response isn’t intentional and he’s not sure if he would be able to stop himself from making it again, not as he watches her grind into him with a shaky, mindless moan, takes in the sight of his cock pressed against her, how it spreads her open and works a whine from her throat before it slips past and up and onto her stomach.

“ _ Fuck,”  _ he grits out, the sound somewhere between desperation and frustration and tinged— _ tainted—  _ with defeat, as he watches her grind up and into him and against his cock. It feels like his thoughts are spilling out of his head and dissolving into nothing in whatever remains of the space between them,  _ should  _ and  _ shouldn’t  _ and  _ right  _ and  _ wrong  _ and  _ too much  _ and  _ not nearly enough  _ blurring together into an endless hum of white noise. He’d think it was funny if there were anything left of him to care; how easy it is, like everything else had been, to give up pretending that he is a good man. 

Bucky exhales, a low, filthy sound, fire sweeping through his arms and his stomach from the strain of holding himself up as he pushes forward into the next roll of her hips, urging her on until he’s right where she wants him to be, nudging up against her cunt and then slipping past again because she’s so fucking wet and he  _ can’t— _

“Bucky,” she cries,  _ needy  _ and  _ empty  _ and  _ desperate, _ rocking up until there’s just the slightest stretch of her around the head of his cock for a flicker of a second before it slides up onto her stomach, shiny and wet and so fucking obscene it should be  _ illegal,  _ wringing a high-strung, shivering moan from the back of her throat. He’s big for her, knows this, realizes it more with every passing second, watching the length of him as it slides over her cunt, heavy and thick between her smaller legs and against the tense, trembling muscles in her belly— he wonders what sounds she might make if he were to stretch her open and fill her up and soothe that  _ ache  _ inside of her that has her trying to work herself down onto his cock with every frantic roll of her hips—

_ Oh, fuck. _

Bucky hitches her thigh over the bend of his elbow and pulls her closer, too far gone to care about anything other than watching her hips arch up and press down again at this new angle, grinding against him,  _ into  _ him, looking for leverage or purchase or  _ something _ as she rubs up against the head of his cock, her hand tightening around the corded bulk of his forearm bracing him over the bed, using it to find just that little bit of pressure that she needs to push down into him and—

_ Yes. _

“Oh,  _ doll _ ,” he chokes, soft and stunned and desperate as he watches that first inch of his cock sink into her,  _ finally _ , spreading her open, wet and warm and  _ tight  _ as her muscles clench down around the width of it—

Her breath hitches underneath him.  _ Catches.  _ Dissolves into something that could have been a cry, might have been, with the way the muscles in her thighs are trembling, her nails digging into the meat of his arm even as she arches against the feeling of it-- of  _ him-- _ blindly,  _ unconsciously,  _ wanting more, her eyes fluttering closed as her lips part around the prettiest little moan—

And he’s  _ gone.  _

“Yes,” she gasps, shivering, her mouth against his jaw, her sigh spilling out warm across his cheek. He’s too breathless to kiss her even as much as he wants to, too undone to  _ think,  _ can’t focus on much more than the tense of his stomach, his thighs, his body trembling above her as she rocks into him in little half-movements like she’s trying to get used to him; the feeling of him, like this, as close as they’ve ever been. Bucky presses his mouth to her neck, reverent, and she whispers his name, the sound of it pouring honey-sweet out of her mouth, broken in half by a hitching, choked-off whine as he sinks in deeper, not deep enough, he isn’t sure— only that she’s clenching down around his cock and his world is narrowing with alarmingly pinpoint precision down to the fluttering tremble of her muscles, the sparks of pain where her nails sink into his shoulders, the too-quick breath she pulls in that shudders through her chest before she takes another, holding it in as her body stiffens, wound tight like a spring.

“Please,” she whispers against his mouth, just as he groans  _ sweetheart.  _ More of his weight drops down over her, bearing the brunt of it on his forearm over her head as he pushes in, inch by inch over a strung-out collection of torturous, unbearable seconds that slip by sticky and slow until finally— _ finally,  _ oh god, finally—he’s pressed snug to the soft cradle of her thighs, his hip bones digging into her hard enough to leave bruises, hard enough to break a desperate, soft sound out of her chest that he drinks up like it’s water and he’s halfway to dying.

Bucky bottoms out, pulls back, presses in again all slow, slower than he can stand, groans at the way she clutches at him— at his arm braced over her, at the tense expanse of his chest, nails sinking into his skin and leaving little half-moon crescent indents across the width of his shoulders that he kind of hopes he’ll be able to see tomorrow, a reminder that this is real and now and  _ happening.  _ She presses her face to his neck and chokes out a moan, shattered and helpless, a sound that  _ hurts  _ him, fills up his chest with longing that he’d spent so long drowning in that it’s almost  _ familiar,  _ makes it too easy to run his hand through her hair and hold her close through the next stroke of him inside of her, comforting, meaningless praise spilling from his mouth easier than anything.

“It’s okay, doll, ‘s all right. I got you. You’re okay. You’re all right, you’re so—you’re  _ so  _ fuckin’ good for me, baby,” Bucky groans, stroking into her as slow and smooth as molasses, the rhythm unbearable and his voice cracking, breaking,  _ crumbling  _ as she squirms underneath him, too high-strung to stay still, panting against his mouth as his cock drags against that bundle of nerves deep inside of her and clinging to him through the next too-gentle roll of his hips. She arches into it, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth that he turns to meet with a groan, tilting his head to kiss her deeper, to drink up the fucked-out little gasps and the desperate hitches of breath that spill from her lips as he moves, his strokes steady and slow and careful because the thought of hurting her breaks something open in his chest that he doesn’t want to think about, certainly not now and probably not  _ ever— _

“Oh--  _ Bucky _ ,” she gasps, screwing her eyes shut tight. He wishes for a second that she’d say something other than his name like that, like it’s the only word worth saying out loud. It’s easier for him to groan in response to it than it would be to speak, the words he wants to say waiting heavy on his tongue so close to his teeth it feels bloody. Bucky rocks into her, the sharp angles of his hips biting into the insides of her thighs with every controlled, too-gentle stroke, working a cry from her throat that bursts out bright and loud in the too-small confines of the cabin. He presses his mouth to her temple again as if that somehow rectifies his actions, the sum of them, laid out side-by-side leading up to this— like it fixes this specific moment, a girl being taken apart by the kind of man who could never earn the right to touch her, not in a thousand lifetimes, not with a million chances. She clenches down tight around him when he pulls back, the head of his cock brushing that spot inside of her again that has her trembling and tensing up and biting down on her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the moan that breaks out of her. His next thrust is a little rougher and a little  _ harder  _ than he’d meant it to be but it’s getting difficult to hold himself back, to separate the way she liquefies against him at the sudden bruising pressure of his cock all deep inside of her from the person that he is, the person that  _ she  _ is, when they’re not intertwined and inter _ connected— _

“ _ Please _ ,” she says, and it’s whiny and a little frantic and mostly desperate, mostly  _ begging,  _ as he slides his hands up the back of her thighs, gripping her ass to lift her hips up higher— and  _ fuck,  _ the changing angle wrenches a broken, helpless groan out of his chest, a slew of meaningless curses as she grinds up, grinds  _ into  _ him, tightening up around his cock enough that it nearly  _ hurts.  _ Hurts  _ good,  _ though, like he’s breaking apart somewhere on the inside, leaking fire into his veins that pools underneath his skin like a full-body bruise as her lips brush and catch on his, not really a kiss, just sharing space and sharing air and sharing  _ closeness— _

“Yeah,” he rasps, the word disappearing into her mouth as he shifts above her to make space between their bodies, twists his hand to get his fingers against her clit, the pressure good and then better and then too-much as her stomach tenses, his name spilling out of her high-pitched and shattered and her body  _ trembling _ , breaking against his like a wave. Below him she’s breathless and flushed and his rhythm has sped up— not on purpose, he can’t help it, but it’s got her eyes fluttering closed and her thighs trembling helplessly, held open by the solid weight of his hand. Her hips roll up against his next thrust and Bucky  _ caves,  _ gives in, uses his other hand to spread her thighs wider and pull her into him, buries his cock completely inside of her just for the way that she cries out, the needy little sob catching hard in the back of her throat. There’s sweat beading in the shallow dips of his collarbones and a sheen of it across his shoulders and the shifting muscles in his back— his skin is sticky with it, burning up in the heat, and Bucky’s not sure if he can take much more of this, can’t quite hold on to his thoughts or the tattered remains of his self-control—

She whispers something that sounds like _ohgod,_ a desperate, overstimulated sound that makes his stomach clench and his head _spin,_ drives him dizzy as she buries her face in his shoulder, a tremble beginning in her muscles that he recognizes, her body tensing down tight around him, so close that she’s shaking with it. Bucky has his hand between their bodies still and he angles it just right to rub a tight, slick little circle around her clit with his fingers and he can tell that it’s too much, he can _feel_ it, he can feel the moment she comes for him, feel it inside of her as she trip-stumbles over the edge of her orgasm and clenches down so tight around his cock that it drags a noise from him that he’s certain he’s never made before, rough and strangled and low in his chest—

“Bucky,” she all but sobs, her body tensing and melting and  _ trembling  _ all at once, her moans hitching out of her chest all soft and needy as he fucks her through it, until her limbs are trembling and every too-quick breath she pulls in comes back out as a cry.

“C’mon, doll, that’s it,” he urges, his voice a low, rasping baritone that’s shot through in desperation and raw with longing, “Come for me-- just like that, there you go, sweetheart, just like that-- you’re so fuckin’ perfect for me, baby--

He leans down to kiss her, and when he does the shiver that works its way down her spine is so strong he can  _ feel it,  _ the little strung-out moan that it works out of her lost into his mouth. There are words he desperately wants to say laying heavy on the back of his tongue and he imagines kissing them into her instead of speaking them out loud as his own orgasm is wrenched from him, his cock throbbing inside of her as his hips tense and then ease agains the cradle of her thighs, the trembling, clenching grip of her cunt around him urging him on until— oh,  _ fuck, yes— _

“(Name),” Bucky pants, breathless, over and over until it’s nothing but a meaningless collection of syllables trying to drown out the little voice in his head that’s saying  _ mine mine mine you’re  _ **_mine._ **

The world comes back to him in fragments. His face, pressed into the curve of her neck. The shallow flutter of her irregular heartbeat slowly evening out. His muscles, every inch of them trembling, his skin slick with sweat, the faint warmth of her body, pliant and soft underneath him. She’s not cold anymore.

Bucky ignores her soft sound of protest when he moves off of her and sits up in the bed. He blinks tiredly at the room, hazy in the low light of the fire in the hearth that had long since been reduced to nothing but a pile of smoldering embers. He feels hazy at the edges, like he’s not quite real. Like none of this is real. Slowly, shape by shape, he can make out the farther corners of the room as his vision adjusts-- a table, a single chair, empty countertops. A hallway to the bathroom. He sits, staring, for far too long, his thoughts thundering in his head hard enough to bring that tension headache back, throbbing persistently behind his left eye.

“C’mon,” Bucky says eventually. His voice is hoarse and almost deafening in the heavy blanket of silence. “Let’s-- let’s get you a bath and some rest before Sam gets back, huh?”

He looks over at her when she doesn’t respond-- she’s asleep, he realizes dumbly, a still shape on the bed, slightly blurry at the edges. He’s not sure if he’s grateful for that or not. He reaches out for her but he comes just short, his hand hovering somewhere over her shoulder, close enough that if she were awake she surely would be able to feel the warmth of him in the air against her skin. It’s more than shame that stops him from touching her this time. Somehow it’s like there’s more distance between them now than there was before, and the space seems vast and insurmountable. Like they’re separated, in two different worlds or time periods or  _ realities _ , and whatever was stringing them together has been broken clean in two and he doesn’t even know where to begin trying to fix it.

“I love you,” he whispers finally, soft and fervent like a confession, because she’s asleep and because it’s easier to say when she can't hear it but mostly because it’s true.

There’s only silence in response.

It's better that way, he thinks, and almost (almost) believes it.


End file.
